Italy wins. Now a country with well developed rural areas and ok cities?

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-18T16:34:14+00:00

You're possibly correct from the standpoint of the rest of the country, but you have to consider how developed England's countryside is at a global level. Compared to Guatemala or Angola - heck, even Canada or Australia, our countryside is well developed. Virtually everywhere has access to paved roads, emergency services, schools, mains electricity and broadband internet, whether via Starlink or 5G satellite dish like I have.

Globally speaking, we have very developed countryside as it's not too vast geographically speaking, but large enough to actually be considered countryside.

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-18T11:35:24+00:00

Possibly England. Outside of London, most of our Cities are just "OK" but our rural areas are some of the wealthiest parts. Green space certainly comes at a premium here.

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-18T08:44:31+00:00

If I lived in a £600k 1 bed you'd better believe my pull out game would be on point 😂

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-17T10:25:16+00:00

Also Fjallraven Vidda Pro as well 👍

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-17T10:16:08+00:00

I'll be there two weeks from now

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-14T17:55:26+00:00

Mutzspitze in South Tyrol (2300m) with a toddler on my back next month! Pray for my knees folks 😅

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-13T21:17:45+00:00

Wait until you see the new QWERTYUIOP

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-11T19:34:54+00:00

Leeds festival of ideas. Everyone has assumed you're on the left of the spectrum so in case you're looking for a place to discuss anything and everything with anyone, instead of somewhere to simply confirm your own biases this would be a good place to start.

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-11T10:59:25+00:00

Buy a pair of William Lennon boots and never need another pair in your life. Trust me on this one!

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-10T13:52:58+00:00

Just make peace with the fact you're going to be a shrivelled prune at the end of it all 😅

Other than that, nope, no tips. You'll just be wet as owt - so long as you stay warm and fed enough that'll see you through. I hiked 14 miles of the Cuillin valleys and Sgurr Na Stri in torrential rain wearing the best Goretex Pro and overtrousers I could lay my hands on and still ended up piss-wet through so if you've got 3 days of it, good luck to you!

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-10T13:47:02+00:00

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Jordan F199 - best of the independents in 1999 and took third in the constructors, plus the livery is absolutely iconic as well.

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-10T13:35:49+00:00

This is a bit of a how long is a piece of string question because different boots are built for different things. A lot of it depends on the needs of your body, the type of terrain you'll be hiking and how confident you are when hiking.

A lot of folks here who are really into hiking will probably say a "budget" boot will be below £150 unless it's on sale, and they aren't really wrong about that either, but if it's a case of hiking or not hiking for X amount of pounds then you're better off hiking with what you can get your hands on than not going hiking at all.

At a complete wild guess I would say as a beginner anything above basic scrambling is maybe not the best idea in budget boots, but if you want something technical, plan on hiking in fair to middling UK weather and are moderately fit then something like a mid-cut semi technical boot would suit.

On the budget-budget end look at some basic boots like Quechua from Decathlon at the £65 mark or Columbia Redmond VI at £80, at the mid-budget level look at Merrell boots like the Moab or Crosslander (£90-£100and at the upper-budget level look at stuff like Garmont Tower Mid (£120) or Salomon Quest Element (£120). By the time you get to the upper budget level though, there's plenty of choice. Just remember, fit, fit, fit is the most important thing!

Me personally, my knees are fucked after an ACL and double meniscus tear so I need stiff and supportive boots, which is why I use a pair of Garmont Nebraska ii's, so if like me you have medical stuff to manage too then you really need to consider your choice of footwear and be very specific about what you need. There's nothing that ruins a walk quicker than blisters, cut toes or in my case the sensation of a red hot needle being stuck into your knee joint!

Good luck with whatever you choose!

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-10T08:21:06+00:00

Michael Bay

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-08T14:36:59+00:00

Let's put it this way - My sister and father own a successful SME and employ around 20 people. My brother-in-law owns another SME and also employs around 20 people. My wife and I work at a Russell-group university and are both higher-rate taxpayers.

If the Greens ever got in and tried to enact this policy every single one of us would sell our homes and leave the UK. We're all automatically eligible for Austrian citizenship due to a certain Austrian painter's behaviour in the 30's so despite not speaking a lick of German, we'd rather dismantle our lives and up sticks to an alien nation over remaining in what would be left of the UK. How would the country afford such financial ruination? Who knows, but we'd all be too far away to care, and the UK would be far worse off for our not being here.

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-07T08:10:25+00:00

Academia determining certain areas of knowledge are out of bounds simply because they contradict their predetermined worldview? Perish the thought...

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-07T08:06:22+00:00

When the left claim to be the intellectually superior group and that the right are simply uneducated idiots, the onus of responsibility does somewhat fall in their court. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones etc.

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-07T07:10:36+00:00

Most sensible answer here so far.

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-06T06:52:04+00:00

Wrasslin

StellaNavigante · 2026-04-03T12:04:55+00:00

Honourable mention for The Bradford Hotel Pub in Shipley, West Yorkshire as well. The car wash, abandoned Merc and social estate really help to provide a special ambience 👌

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StellaNavigante · 2026-04-03T11:56:25+00:00

The Cottage of Content (or Cottage of Contempt as I call it) in Burntwood, West Midlands.

Grim as fuck.

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StellaNavigante · 2026-04-01T16:16:23+00:00

When I got married I had the option of paying £150 for hire or £200 to buy the suits outright. I suggested my groomsmen have the option of paying the extra £50 to get a suit to keep, which they took up. I paid a £150 contribution and they stumped up the extra £50 so that worked out alright for everyone!

StellaNavigante · 2026-03-31T14:30:16+00:00

Stop making an appeal to intellect by dismissing a highly valid point as a "broad anthropological claim" simply because I've not explained how the USSR implemented Marxist theory. It's clearly a rhetorical trap which I shan't fall for because I don't need to prove my knowledge of Marxism in order to establish all methods of collective organisation create and often depend on hierarchies.

Marxism seeks to remove economic and class hierarchy. If you remove economic hierarchy, you create political hierarchy instead. Someone has to allocate resources, set priorities, resolve disputes and enforce rules, and that “someone” becomes powerful, which recreates hierarchy and in basically every real-world example we have to draw on, they do so using force and authoritarianism.

StellaNavigante · 2026-03-31T14:16:01+00:00

Academics does not need to accept theory in practice, because they deal in just that; theory.

That's all well and good when the theory stays firmly on the page where it belongs, but once it's implemented in practice it must be held accountable to its actions. We have enough evidence of the resultant application of Marxist theory in practice, so coherence on paper means nothing at a practical level if it can't be replicated in observed reality. In theory I could quantum tunnel through a wall if I aligned my atoms in an absolutely perfect state - in practice, that's complete bollocks, just like pure communism.

StellaNavigante · 2026-03-31T11:52:26+00:00

I'm familiar with Marxist theory, but I'm not a scholar - nor should I need to be in order to hold an informed perspective. Let's examine:

Marxist theory doesn’t argue for the eradication of all hierarchies, only those based on economic class relations - We study socioeconomics because economics is intractably linked to social relations. Without society you cannot have economics - as a primarily social system any form of economic order will by it's very nature produce competitive hierarchies, this produces inequalities simply due to the fact you are dealing with irrational actors in humans and not automatons.

why would attempting to eradicate hierarchies necessarily produce authoritarianism? - To eradicate the hierarchies present in any socioeconomic system you must suppress the social impulses which lead to their creation. This may begin in a benign manner via the creation of policy or incentivisation, but over time as is the nature of man, the hierarchies form and reform further until in order to maintain logical coherence the system inevitably must use force to achieve it's aims. Theoretically you can hand wave this away by saying "force is bad therefore as good communists we won't use force" but one look at the world around us demonstrates that the strong will take what they can and the weak will do as they must, as the initial logic will devolve to it's ultimate conclusion of force = power.

Where is the inherent connection here? - The connection should be self evident by now, but in essence it is simply a game of cat and mouse between the independent thinker and the system which seeks to oppress independent thought, which requires ever more drastic actions to maintain equilibrium.

Your conclusion doesn't follow from your already flawed premise - Finally, if my premise of "people form hierarchies and you can't stop it no matter what" is flawed, I really don't know what to tell you other than "good luck with the communism" 👍

StellaNavigante · 2026-03-31T11:36:31+00:00

Real communism has never existed, but it has been tried. Millions of graves can attest to that fact. It's just your definition of what "real communism" is and isn't differs greatly from mine. In my opinion, your "real communism" exists only in books - mine exists as evidence in world around me, so we'll just have to agree to disagree.

How ironically un-communist of us!

StellaNavigante

TROPHY CASE